Books, Books, and More Books.....

One of my favorite things is to walk into the library and see boxes sitting on my desk, this means books have arrived!!! Our latest arrivals are full of mystery, intrigue, ambition and life choices. They range from Hamlet in graphic novel form, to a biography about a man who went from the inner city, to Yale only to fall victim to a life of drugs. There are books about mystery and thrillers to a great batch of children's books. The best part of receiving the new books is having the students standing around waiting for them to be cataloged and processed so they can begin to read them. For those they believe reading is dead, they should come down and see the excitement on our student's faces.

Speaking of reading, one of the highlights of this week was when Ms. Michelson brought down her students for a lesson on using the catalog and finding books in the library. We spent a block learning how to search in our online catalog, choosing topics that interested us and browsing the shelves for great books. I also spent time discussing with the students what kind of books they would like to see on the shelves and have begun to order books that appeal to them. Everyone left with a book either in their hands or put a request in for a book from one of our other school libraries. Nothing pleased me more than to see the happiness in their eyes when they found a book that excited them. Ms. Michelson is going to make this a regular visit!

Blog Book of the Week

We Were Liars / E. Lockhart

This was one of my favorite books I read in the last few months. It is a chilling tale that leaves you guessing right until the end. It was a page turner and kept me up at night with just "one more page" before I turned in. I felt invested in the characters, I loved that it took place in Massachusetts, and the story flowed so that you were always on your toes but never lost!

From School Library Journal: Gr 9 Up—Cadence Sinclair Easton comes from an old-money family, headed by a patriarch who owns a private island off of Cape Cod. Each summer, the extended family gathers at the various houses on the island, and Cadence, her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and friend Gat (the four "Liars"), have been inseparable since age eight. During their fifteenth summer however, Cadence suffers a mysterious accident. She spends the next two years—and the course of the book—in a haze of amnesia, debilitating migraines, and painkillers, trying to piece together just what happened. Lockhart writes in a somewhat sparse style filled with metaphor and jumps from past to present and back again—rather fitting for a main character struggling with a sudden and unexplainable life change. The story, while lightly touching on issues of class and race, more fully focuses on dysfunctional family drama, a heart-wrenching romance between Cadence and Gat, and, ultimately, the suspense of what happened during that fateful summer. The ending is a stunner that will haunt readers for a long time to come.—Jenny Berggren, formerly at New York Public Library